lol, what with all the new games coverage, its easy to miss these kind of help request posts. Here's a general over view of adminning a CoD5 server.

ACCESS THE ADMIN - you need a few basic commands.
first you need your rcon password - if you're renting a server, there should be an rcon password in the server.cfg file - use notepad to open it. Its text should read vertically - if not, get the free notepad++ or else open it in wordpad. The rcon password is usually something like "somepass" or "changeme" - you need to change it to something you can remember and is not easily guessable, like "12345".
You can put a special character in it - like this "somepass*" - something less likely to be guessed. Though the overall CoD5 server count is under 1000, there are still opportunistic types out there, sometimes even your "friends" can turn.

So - to really open up the console - full screen - hit your Shift & Tilde keys at same time. Now you can see the text you type and its response. There is a scroll bar on this full screen - hit your page down key to scroll to bottom to see this "dialogue".

Never forget to put the forward slash - "/" - in front of every console command that you type, otherwise it will show up in game as chat.

Try typing this into console while on your server, using your rcon password in place of yourpassword - btw, you do not need to use quote marks in any console command typing.

num - number is the slot # or Client ID - if you're first on, you occupy slot 0. That is useful info when kicking or banning a client or player.

score - in game score.

ping - in milliseconds - your internet connection to the game server.

guid - game user id - its a 9 or 10 digit number assigned to your client based on your game serial - by the game. You can use this as a kick / ban info, or with some mods, grant admin rights for a mod's in-game admin control - an in-game screen menu.

name - your game name - also useable for kick / ban actions.

Lastmsg - dunno what it is and i've never used it.

address - the client's IP address

Qport - thats the port # the client is using to send/receive data to the server.

Rate - that is the maximum amount of data flow - set in the server.cfg - for the client.

When you do an /rcon status command in console, it not only shows you client infos, but confirms that you are logged in with the rcon password.

CONNECTING and LOGGING IN TO RCON
A simpler way to connect and to be logged in to your server, is to make a specific shortcut. Find your CoD5 multiplayer shortcut - Right click & drag it and drop - click Copy. Now you rightclick on the copied shortcut and click on Properties.
In the Target field, you should see this text, and first time you see it, it will be highlit:

"C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty - World at War\CoDWaWmp.exe"

If your install path for the CoD5 game is different from above, then use it as it appears in your Target field.

What you can do is add the following text to the above line. The easy way to do this is to open up a notepad - and copy the above text from your shortcut's Target field and paste it into the notepad.

Now, you want to put this following text into that notepad with one space between it and the end of the Target field text in the notepad-

+connect xx.xx.xx.xx +rcon login yourpassword

So the xx.xx.xx.xx. is your server's IP address, the yourpassword is your rcon password. If the port # is the default 28960, then its not needed. If its different, then its added after the IP address, like so - xx.xx.xx.xx:xxxxx

Here's the new Target field text in the notepad that you are now going to copy and paste into the shortcut's Target field.

There is a blank space between the last quote mark and the first + sign.

The easy way to paste this into the Target field is to copy the new text, then right click on your new shortcut, click on Properties and the Target field is already highlit - use keyboard shortcut to paste it - hit your Control key and now hit your V key. Otherwise, it can get very sloppy - you may end up with the Target field text doubled or repeating itself. You can tell if it works by doubleclicking it and if it takes you to your server and you do the /rcon status command in console, and you see the status results, you have done this procedure correctly !

Once you're logged into your gameserver console, you are the MASTER.

So this is a big step, especially if you're new to working with cfgs and commands and dvars. Learn to work with notepad and a few keyboard shortcuts and how to talk with console - you can type just about any word into console and console will echo it back at screen bottom, in some version. If you want to see a list of commands, type /cmdlist and hit enter key - scroll up and down. If you want to see the game's dvars, type in /dvarlist - you'll recognize some of these words and phrases from your server.cfg

PARAMETERS - read your server.cfg - there should be explanations for most of these settings - wherever you see the double forward slash - "//" - that text is commenting out, or rendering a command inactive, or allowing for a comment - the server will not read anything to the right of a double forward slash - "//"

Btw, if you want to generate a console.log file on your server, set the 0 to 1 at set logfile. It can tell you of errors when your server locks up or crashes - its a text file you can download via ftp from the server.

Most of the settings you find in a server.cfg are commented or are self-explanatory. And there is always google - you can search just about any command as it exists - CoD5 comes from a long line of games that use a version of the old Quake engine - there are a lot of common commands from these games.
You can find definitions for the odd commands, but most are spelled out in the server.cfg as to their function; though some commands are counter intuitive or ineffective or out of date/use, but theyare still present in the server.cfg

KICK - kick somebody ? Use /rcon status to find the offender's client ID #
then use this command to kick them off the server - they'll be able to come right back tho, but you just got their attention, for good or bad.

/rcon clientkick #
hit enter key

To ban:

/rcon banClient #

This action should ban a user by their client number and writes their GUID to a ban.txt file

/rcon tempBanClient

This should ban a client according to the time set in seconds in your server.cfg - see this command - set sv_kickBanTime "60" - I have mine set to 60 seconds.

How to unban a permanent ban ? delete that name from the ban.txt file.
So you gotta pay attention to the names that go with the client IDs. Yes you can ban by name, but it can be very frustrating as you have to spell the name as it is - and players use a lot of characters - weird ones - in their game names. So use the client ID. But banning is rare, kicks are somewhat more common.

Once you get a feel for it all, you might check out one of the streaming sites, like pbbans.com

TANK DYNAMICS - on a stock server, you can change the leadfoot perk's speed only - we used to have tank races ! No changes to the health works, as far as I can recall.

set vehicle_perk_leadfoot_speed_increase 3.00 // 1.35

That 3.00 is way fast, the default is 1.35

Give it all a shot and share your server, you may get a few takers from here
Feel free to add or correct anything that I've put up here.

Yah - Zeroy's link works - but if you need a bit of help if you're renting from Gameservers.com - I can help.